Society for Music Research
Angelina Gibson
Historical Musicology
Angelina Gibson is a first-year Historical Musicology PhD pre-candidate and a recent graduate (magna cum laude) of Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota where she majored in Music (piano), English (literature emphasis), and religion, all with distinction.
While at Augustana, Gibson served as an internationally-certified Writing Center tutor from 2019 and became its inaugural Assistant Director in 2021. A passionate advocate for linguistic justice and writing education, Gibson remains dedicated to assisting others in finding their unique, authentic writerly voice. Gibson is the 2022 Concerto-Aria winner, 2022 Christmas Vespers soloist, and attained honors in music for her senior lecture-recital, titled “Seeking the Wanderer: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Franz Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasie.” Gibson also pursued religion and English departmental honors through independent research theses: Sirens of the Dancing Lights: Why Create in the World of the Creator?”—which reflected upon her personal authorship in light of God as a creating being through her own original dance-theater production—and “Reading Liberty: Gender, Image, and Text in ‘The New Colossus’ and the Statue of Liberty During the Trump Administration”, an analysis of the poem and statue in response to the Trump immigration bans. Gibson has also been the recipient of academic awards such as the Augustana University Covenant Award for Excellence, alternate for the Nobel Peace Scholars, and the Arthur Olsen Research Symposium’s “Lifelong Learner” award for “Reading Liberty.”
An invested collaborator, Gibson founded Augustana’s first fine arts dance company, The ArtiTänzer Project, which eventually led to her longtime collaboration with Dr. Yi Chun Lin’s Sioux Falls Chamber Music Collective as both a choreographer and pianist. Gibson’s research and writing has been published in the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra’s Centennial program books, The Clarinet Online, and Venture (Augustana’s creative arts journal), thus far. Her research at the University of Michigan orients around music-image-law relations in American white nationalism/supremacy and America at large, with particular emphases on January 6th and politics.
Contact: ahgibson@umich.edu